Why bother with Hit/Expertise capping as Blood?

Pardon for the simple question, but since it is my understanding that DS can neither be parried, nor does missing affect the heal or shield provided, and since rune strike can neither be dodged or parried, getting hit/expertise capped seems a bit of a waste. Is there a reason I see conflicting reports? My blood DK is an alt that I just started playing. The only 2 reasons I can think of for capping hit/expertise are 1.) SoB stacks and 2.) DPS/TPS and never missing outbreak.

Am I missing something really simple here? I can understand at higher gear levels or with tier/other pieces that already have hit/expertise on it, but it would seem that most pieces with hit/expertise would be better for warrior/pally tanks.

I checked out Riggnaros and he's reforging out of hit/expertise (Unless reforging out of dodge/parry gives him more mastery).

Currently I'd think that for normal mode tanking, stacking stam to a point, than going mastery->Parry->dodge (Keeping parry the rate ratio above dodge to minimize DR) would be ideal, but I can't figure out why guides are advising hit/expertise, and not understanding something drives me nuts!

Defensive stats are for defense, but if you are not spiking, and your healers are bored, why not trade off a little bit for some more damage to get this shit over with just that much quicker? Of course, if you are pushing heroic progression, you should focus on defense and yell at your DPS to do their goddamn job. ...erm, tell your DPS to focus on 1112231112233 and not standing in the bad circles.

For all other tanks then Dk Hit and Expertice are best becous if they mis/dodge/parry they dont get holly power/rage/chi witch they spend for deff and off abilities
for DK its more about DPS , personaly i prefer when my tank is doing higer DPS insted of having 5% more dodge or parry if we hit enrage timer on boss

You don't really lose all that much defensive stacks in order to bump up your expertise and hit. Personally, I get close to hit cap and get some expertise but I don't stress if I don't hit cap. Mainly because once you have enough gear, and know how to use your cooldowns, normal mode tanking is pretty simple.

The only time you really need to stack stam is when your undergeared for the content or there is heavy magic damage.

One of the nicer things about blood dk's is that there is no single answer. The stats you use will be determined mainly by the group you run with and the content your running. What works for one blood dk might not work for another due to personal skill, raid skill, or even the strategy of a fight.

The more of my behavior you accept, the less you will have to forgive.

hit cap is important for outbreak not missing, blood boil as a spell, and for rune strike generating resources. expertise is only even semi-attractive until 7.5%. once you take dodges off the table, it's value is reduced to a marginal increase in melee and heart strike DPS. it DOES increase your scent of blood frequency, but that's hardly a reason to stack it. death strike and rune strike both cannot be parried; blood boil and outbreak are spells. they're not affected at all over the 7.5% dodge cap.

hell, we're currently even bugged and get DS heals/shields on dodges and misses.

As others have said, it's just dps. You gain about an average of 2% increase in mitigation from SoB stacks, but lose enough avoidance that it's a net loss.
As far as DS being "bugged" to always heal/shield, I imagine after 3 months it's probably working as intended.

Let's look at what you're actually getting by hit capping. (not going to bother with exp, since you can't get hit and ext to 7.5% without losing a significant amount of mastery in our current gear)

Every hit you have a 7.5% to miss (not counting dodges/parries remember) at 0% hit. That means on every melee hit there is a 92.5% chance that all the points you put into hit are going to waste. Over a 3 melee window that's a 79% chance to not lose any SoB stacks due to misses. People make it out that by getting hit cap you are just getting "more" sob stacks, but in reality you are just lowering your already low chance to lose an SoB stack.

Because doing 20k+ more dps on heroic progress bosses is yummy when healing a proper tank isn't. As far as my own progression goes (10/16 hc) hardly any encounter was wiped because we lost a tank, most of the time we are "killed" by tactics and individual mess up.
If your raid has some tank issues, check out his rotation and if everything is correct burn the healers.

It's important to note that Rune Strike cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, but it can miss. If consistent Rune Strike hits are important to you, then hit rating will have a bit more value that expertise.

As far as my own progression goes (10/16 hc) hardly any encounter was wiped because we lost a tank

wut? o_O

I'm still not a fan of trying to push DPS. Generally, if you're just barely killing the boss, it means overall you have the idea down, but strats need to be tightened. If you work at it, that 1% wipe can be tuned into a 25-people-alive kill relatively quickly. Tank DPS is fine and all, but vengeance will give you more than enough help.

@Fangless > Maybe because it's FREE. So why not ? What if someone dies during the end of the encounter, no rez available and my dps helps killing him ? Most first kills aren't clean with everyone alive and healers not near full mana. I always get replies like that, but as i said, healing tanks isn't an issue so far if done properly (and from vidz i've seen on the rest won't be for some time), dps could be from time to time especially on progress bosses. So why not ? Doesn't cost anything.

If you feel like making a happy median where you don't want to cap both hit/exp I would say just take hit rating. it makes rune strike never miss, makes it so DS can only be dodged, and still gives your outbreak a good chance at connecting. Compare this to exp not doing anything for rune strike and its value is def higher in the grand scheme of things.

Also, tank DPS does help more than people might let on. Blood DKs can get their DPS extremely close to or above DPS classes (wind lord mel'jarak comes to mind). I know in my groups it pushes our DPS to be better as well so they don't get beaten by the tank which is amusing.

No, it's not just about DPS or threat consistency. Scent of Blood is a guaranteed proc for your autoattacks, but only if those autoattacks actually strike the target. Adding more hit and expertise translates to more runic power and reduces the chance of your Death Strikes randomly being less effective.

Also, a Death Strike that is avoided cannot benefit from any Scent of Blood stacks you currently have. They aren't consumed, but they don't provide any bonus for that DS.

Also, tank DPS does help more than people might let on. Blood DKs can get their DPS extremely close to or above DPS classes (wind lord mel'jarak comes to mind). I know in my groups it pushes our DPS to be better as well so they don't get beaten by the tank which is amusing.

Wind Lord is actually a bad example for blood dks because we can't go all out on aoe and don't scale very well with vengeance.
Any other boss with mostly single target we're golden especially on 10m where we can mostly keep ourselves alive.

copied from the other hit/exp thread that's going on in the dk forums on battle.net since i'm too lazy to type it all out again:

someone mentioned that if your raid is wiping at 1% then you would have wished you had gone for hit/exp. Let's actually take a look at a fight like that. H garajal. The average dps for that fight for the top 100 parses is 69k. If you were to hit cap, you would gain 6% of that, which is 4.14k 4.14k dps over an enrage of 6 minutes is about 1.5m damage that you gained by hit capping (this is compared to 0 hit, btw, which isn't realistic in current gear). 25H gara'jal has a health pool of 543m, so by hit capping as opposed to 0 hit, you would have given the raid a grand total of 0.28% extra damage on garajal. If hit kept giving you dps linearly past cap at 6% dps per 7.5% hit, it would take about (napkin math time) 26.8% hit to get you to be contributing even 1% of the boss over the whole fight. Tank dps IS important, but don't blow it out of the water. Granted, this was based on 25H data. Let's look at 10H data now.

The average (out of the top 100 again) blood dps for 10H gara'jal is about 68k. 6% more gives 4.08k more dps. that 4.08k over 6 minutes turns out to be 1.46m damage. on 10H difficulty the boss has 179m hp, which means you hit capping did an extra 0.8% on the boss. Now, it isn't quite 1% but it's much closer. You can see how 10m tank damage matters more than 25m tank damage, but it's still not something that you HAVE to do. How often are you wiping to .08%? And remember that's compared to nothing at all for accuracy.

TL;DR
hit is a good personal DPS increase, but 6% more dps for YOU isn't even close to 6% for the RAID. Tank dps doesn't beat engrage timers. Maximizing your dps through proper playstyle is important, but sacrificing survivability for it doesn't make sense unless you either REALLY need the dps or you REALLY don't need the survivability.